Fair warning: this post right here is so picture heavy, it's bordering on actual obesity. Proceed at your own risk, my friends!
So, where were we? Friday. Friday was a good one, y'all. A very good one.
The night prior, I sternly told Cassandra that we had to be out of the door "by ten a.m." We were out the door at a little past eleven. But no matter, we strolled over to Clinton Street Baking Company and asked for a stack of blueberry pancakes to go, with a drizzle of warm maple butter on top, please.
Then, with our little bag of pancakes in hand, we meandered two streets over to Russ & Daughters Appetizers, which is famous for their lox and cream cheese bagels.
So, of course, we had to order our own Nova Scotia lox and scallion cream cheese bagels with capers and onions. Outside, there was conveniently a colorful bench for us to perch on. Down we sat, and into our hands and mouths went half of a bagel each.
Umphgfhhhh. Amazing. Truly. Everything you could dream to have when you come to New York craving a good old New York bagel. Except the price, but let's just chalk it up to the New York experience, shall we?
Our salty tooth satisfied, now our sweet tooth craved some attention.
And attention it got:
If heaven existed in the form of pancakes... this would be it.
Feeling a little guilty about our indulgences, Cassandra and I thought a nice little walk through SoHo should compensate for the 230948 calories we inhaled so easily.
And so we window-shopped and picked out what we wanted if "we were to one day make six figures." She wants a Burberry necktie. I want a collection of Vince sweaters.
Now, this is where the story starts getting really good.
One of the items on our "MUST DO" list (as opposed to our MUST DO list or MUST DO list) was to see a Broadway play together. We really wanted to see Wicked, but knew it to be a little out of our price range. So we paid a visit to the TKTS booth, hoping to find If/Then or Once tickets at a decent price. We got to the Times Square line at about 1:30pm and needed to wait until 3:00 for booth to open.
The two of us stood in line, then we sat in line, then we stood again. We pored over the little booklet of possible options. And then we started discussing (this is what happens when we have too much time spent in line. we start thinking up 'grand' plans).
Would we rather spent $30 on a show that we might end up liking a lot, or like $100 on a show that we both know we love, and that we would love to watch together for the first time?
Yeah well, the logic made sense at the time.
We decided to try our hand at the Wicked lottery. You go to the theater two and a half hours before the show begins, put your name in, and 13 names get drawn to sit front row for $30. Who would be stupid enough to do this all day long? Like 30 people? ---we reasoned.
So we left the TKTS line. The line in which we were in the first portion. The first portion of a line that looped twice around half of Times Square. After waiting for an hour. We even had to jump over a couple of low barriers to leave the line because no one's ever stupid enough to do that. And if we ended up not somehow winning the lottery, we were fully prepared to spend $90 tickets on crappy last-row, next-day Wicked seats, even though it would have been Cassandra's sixth time seeing it and my second. I never said we make sense as people, you know.
As we waited for the lottery to begin, we made a detour to the McGee's Pub, which inspired the bar in How I Met Your Mother:
It's actually a very fun place. Nice and quiet. And they make a hell of a pina colada + strawberry daiquiri at a price that's actually fair! That's always a newsflash to me now. They also had fun drinks named after the characters, but we were boring. What else is new.
With some more time on our hands, I decided this was the best time to take Cassandra over to Levain Bakery for a double chocolate chocolate chip cookie:
Needless to say, I think she approved.
A peek at the Lincoln Center on the way back to the theater:
Aaaaand, now at the Gershwin!
We feeling lucky?
It turns out there weren't 30 people in line.
There were maybe, like, 200. We thought for sure we wouldn't be seeing a show tonight, especially after they called out name after name after name and none of them even began with a "C." Heartbreaking.
Until....
Cassandra's name was called second to last!!!
That girl is so strangely lucky when luck is truly needed. Why else do you think I've stayed friends with her all this time?
In a state of a little bit of shock and a lot of giddiness, we took advantage of the two hours we had left before the show started to go get some Shake Shack. Only to bring back our trophies to the garage outside of the Gershwin, because classy is as classy does.
Amazing show. Phenomenal talent, hilarious as per usual.
The leads were all phenomenal. And get this - do you remember Justin Guarini from American Idol and From Justin to Kelly fame? I do, because I remember my sister losing faith in my cinematic tastes after I claimed FJ2K to be my "favorite movie of all time."
Well. Justin was Fiyero. A Fiyero who was "really smooth and knows how to move. Just look at him jumping up those statues and shimmying," according to my roommate. Be still my ten-year-old heart.
After the show, we totally geeked out over meeting the girls who played Glinda and Elphaba who were both so sweet. Heartthrob Justin didn't make an appearance though, sadly.
